e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Ed Tech

The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.

  • Blackboard Fails Statistics 101

    Blackboard has posted their response to the USPTO ruling. They make some claims about how this will impact the trial, which I’m not in a position to evaluate just yet. They mention that all of the claims in the re-examination request “were unsuccessfully raised by Desire2Learn during recent litigation,” which is irrelevant since these are different forums operating under different rules with different burdens of proof. But what really gave me pause was their statistic. They claimed that “more than 90% of patents that undergo reexamination of this kind ultimately are upheld.” That didn’t seem consistent with the statistics that I remembered. Where did that number come from?

    Funny story, that…

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  • All 44 Blackboard Patent Claims Invalidated by USPTO

    This just in:

    On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard’s claims. We caution that this is a NON-final action; both Blackboard and Desire2Learn will have an opportunity to comment before a final action will issue, and after that, the decision will be subject to appeals.

    This decision actually should have come before the trial verdict but was held up because the USPTO had to decide what to do about the separate filings from D2L and SFLC. Now, in addition to the fact that Blackboard will be able to argue against the ruling with the USPTO, there are a number of questions regarding how this affects the court case. Will the damages finding still stand? Will the USPTO ruling render moot D2L’s post-trial motion before the judge regarding invalidity? If not, will it imact that ruling? What happens to the issues of royalties and injunction going forward? I think that I know the answers to some of these questions but don’t want to post anything until I have some more authoritative information.

    Stay tuned.

  • Mashing Up the LMS the Google Way

    I have mentioned before Cambridge’s My Sakai project which, writ large, can be seen as an attempt to make Sakai more compatible with Web 2.0 by supporting development of widgets, gadgets, Facebook applications, and so on. Well, they’ve made some substantial progress of late, inspired in part by the Apache Shindig implementation of Google’s OpenSocial API. They’ve created a development paradigm that mostly eschews Java in favor of the HTML, Javascript, and RESTful web services that most Web 2.0 developers will find very familiar. The work, still very much in the experimental stage, recently culminated in a four-day workshop in which 4 Sakai schools (Cambridge, Michigan, Georgia Tech, and U of Toronto) created a new and more user-friendly interface for file sharing within Sakai.

    Here’s how some of the participants described the effort and its results:

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  • Comment Troubles

    I’m getting occasional reports from people that they’re getting error messages when they try to submit comments hereon e-Literate. (Something about headers.) Rest assured that, despite whatever the error message is telling you, your comment is getting into my blog and trapped by my spam filter. I check that filter daily and will release your comment (assuming its appropriate) as soon as I see it.

    Sorry for the inconvenience. I may be switching to a different comment spam filter in the near future.

  • Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle

    The American Association of Community College’s Instructional Technology Council (ITC) has just published its 2007 Distance Education Survey Results, covering data from 154 U.S. community colleges. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it. Here are the headlines that I drew from it:

    • Distance education continues to grow at a very healthy clip, particularly in this market segment.
    • Blackboard is losing market share rapidly
    • Moodle doubled it’s market share in the past 12 months and now has the highest market share after Blackboard/WebCT in this market segment.
    • ANGEL and D2L also grew their market share.
    • We have reason to expect more LMS churn in the near future, which is bad for Blackboard.
    • The top 5 areas of likely distance learning-related service growth in this segment are (1) online student organization web site and services, (2) online counseling and advising, (3) online plagiarism evaluation, (4) audio/video streaming, and (5) online textbook sales.

    As you can imagine, the LMS market share stuff is what interests me the most at the moment.

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  • Case Study on Moving from WebCT to Moodle

    EDUCAUSE has posted a presentation by SUNY Delhi’s Clark Shah-Nelson on their transition from WebCT CE to Moodlerooms-hosted Moodle. It’s quite good. By all accounts (including the presentation), it has been a pretty smooth transition for Delhi. But the biggest deal is the cost comparison, which Clark lays out in his slides. The total cost is just way cheaper than the alternatives. Particularly for schools that are just looking for a decent all-around LMS and don’t have very specific functional or integration needs, the Moodlerooms offering is tough to beat.

  • On Open Source, Open Standards, and Lock-in

    I’ve been meaning to comment on D’Arcy Norman’s frustrations with not being able to export Moodle courses to a common standard. He makes a very important point:

    Moodle happily ingests those formats, acting to absorb content into what then becomes an inescapable pit of quicksand. It’s a one-way trip. Content can check in, but it can never leave.

    If Blackboard did that, there would be villagers marching in the streets with torches in hand. The Blackboard SCORM import/export stuff might not be perfect, but at least they try to let people move content out.

    With Moodle, it’s currently a vendor lock-in proposition. The only saving grace is that the vendor just happens to be an open source project. But it’s still lock-in.

    Now, I don’t know any of the specifics around Moodle’s export capabilities but, in general, universities should insist on support for some standard export capability in any platform they adopt. We all know that the cost (in time and/or dollars) of moving content from one system to another is one of the major barriers to universities who would otherwise be motivated to switch. So unless you plan on sticking with your next platform forever, make sure you press your vendor or open source community hard about supporting some sort of content exit strategy. Heck, even if your school loves Moodle (or whatever) and plans on staying with it as long as, say, John McCain wants the U.S. to stay in Iraq, individual teachers move from school to school and, depending on their contract, are usually entitled to take their course content with them. That is, if they can get it out of the LMS.

    To be fair, supporting a robust, standards-based export facility is a hard problem, in part because we keep adding tools to our learning environment and each tool needs an import/export format to work in the standard. Nevertheless, basic support for export (focusing maybe on a handful of widely used tools) is far better than none.